FREDERICK DOUGLASS
N A R R AT I V E O F T H E L I F E O F
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
A N A M E R I C A N S L AV E
WRITTEN BY HIMSELF
INTRODUCTION BY
ROBERT B. STEPTO
j o h n
h a r v a r d
l i b r a r y
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, En­gland 2009
Copyright © 2009 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
all rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data available from the Library of Congress
ISBN: 978-­0-­674-­03401-­3
Contents
Introduction by Robert B. Stepto vii
Note on the Text xxix
Chronology of Frederick Douglass’s Life xxxi
N A R R AT I V E O F T H E L I F E O F
FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Selected Bibliography 123
Introduction:
Frederick Douglass Writes His Story
I
n 1 8 4 5 , t h e ye a r the extraordinary memoir Narrative of the
Life of Frederick Douglass was published, Douglass was twenty-­
seven years old and a fugitive slave. Which is to say, despite escaping
from bondage in 1838, marrying and starting a family, and earning
wages with his labor, despite his new life with a new name in Massachusetts, where he also found a new career as a spokesman for the
abolitionist cause, Frederick Douglass was still a slave. This fact was
announced at ev­ery antislavery meeting—indeed, Douglass’s role at
these meetings was to be The Slave Who Tells His Story—at the same
time that certain details of Douglass’s story were suppressed: it was
considered imprudent and dangerous for Douglass to offer his former name, to name his master, or to reveal the county and state of
his bondage, for that would in effect invite slave-­catchers (or even
“men-­of-­the-­law”) to seize and abduct him back into the hell of slavery. Eventually, as Douglass tells us in the memoirs that came after
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the Narrative, his oral account of his story (related no doubt with
­increasing ease, wit, and irony) created more and more skepticism
within his audiences: “People doubted if I had ever been a slave. They
said I did not talk like a slave, look like a slave, nor act like a slave,
and that they believed I had never been south of Mason’s and Dixon’s
line.”1 The response of the abolitionists was both remarkable and revealing. For their part, they pressed Douglass all the more to tell his
story, urging him that it was “better to have a little of the plantation
manner of speech than not” (MB 362).
This, then, is the context in which Douglass retired to Lynn, Massachusetts, to write the Narrative. On the one hand, Douglass had decided to “tell all” and to confront the skeptics with the names and
facts related to his bondage. As he declared in an address of 1845, he
would mention the names “for the sake of the cause—for the sake of
humanity,” adding, “I will mention the names and glory in running
the risk.”2 Douglass knew full well that in publishing the names he
was ensuring that this information would become a matter of public
record; he was answering his Northern critics and striking back at the
Southern slaveholders to the greatest extent that his hard-­won literacy
afforded. But he was also striking back at the abolitionists, who did
not contest his history as a slave but did have fixed ideas about Douglass’s role in the antislavery movement and about his place among
them as a black man. In writing his story in the pages of the Narrative,
Douglass was at one and the same time conforming to the abolitionists’ insistence that he stick to his story and making certain that his
relations with them would most certainly change. Somehow, Douglass intuitively knew that to write and craft his story as opposed to
“telling it” was to compose and author himself. In doing so, he wrested
his story from its “place” in the antislavery meeting agenda and created for it a life of its own.
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ix
This meant, of course, that Douglass had created for himself more
of a life of his own. The publication of the Narrative, with all its revelations, forced him to flee for his safety to the British Isles for two
years. But seen another way, the book’s publication allowed Douglass
to get away and to be more of a speaker, intellectual, and leader, and
more of a man, than the Boston abolitionists would have deemed appropriate.
In the course of pursuing his personal motivations for producing
the Narrative, Douglass wrote a truly great American book. It is, as
Benjamin Quarles declared years ago, “an American book in theme,
in tone, and in spirit.”3 We see this especially in the ways the Narrative
par­tic­i­pates in so many sub­genres of American narrative literature.
For example, the Narrative is arguably a captivity narrative, not just
because it portrays the perils and af­flic­tions besetting a captive people, but also because it emphatically suggests that Douglass was saved
from “the galling chains of slavery” because he was chosen. To be sure,
Douglass was a “self-­made man” (another veritable American theme
Douglass embodied), but in the Narrative he clearly contends that he
was put on the path to freeing himself by “a special interposition of
divine Providence,” a “living word of faith and spirit of hope” that
was a gift from God (NFD 42). While the immediate work of such
declarations is to portray a faith that is liberating and in sharp contrast to the hypocritical religion of slaveholders, the statements also
place Douglass in the company of early American captivity narrativists such as Mary Rowlandson and John Marrant, who were also certain of their chosenness and of the power of their faith. Douglass’s
beliefs as they are expressed in the Narrative are one reason his voice
has been described as “preacherly”; they are also a reason the Narrative, among his other writings, is considered to have “a scriptural sig­
nifi­cance.”4
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INTRODUCTION
Douglass’s book is also an example of the great American tradition of the cause narrative. The cause in Douglass’s written story is
the abolition of slavery; more precisely it is the cause of promulgating
the Garrisonian agenda for abolishing slavery. We see this from the
beginning, when the authenticating documents (vouching for Douglass’s character, veracity, and so on) are provided by none other than
William Lloyd Garrison himself and by Wendell Phillips, thus giving
Garrison in particular the opportunity to proclaim a chief tenet of his
abolitionist platform: “NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO
UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!” Other features of the Garrisonian position appear later in the Narrative, as David Blight has observed: “Readers of the 1845 Narrative . . . will find many in­flu­ences of
the Garrisonian doctrines, especially the attacks on religious hypocrisy and the remarkable moment in Chapter 2 when Douglass compares trusted slaves who pleased overseers with the ‘slaves of political
parties.’ . . . The book is as much an abolitionist polemic as it is a revealing autobiography.”5
Blight’s remarks direct us to consider that Douglass was pursuing two causes, the abolitionist cause and his own, autobiographical
cause. In pursuing the former, Douglass was, in 1845, still enmeshed
in the vocabulary and discourse of Garrison and other associates of
the Massachusetts Anti-­Slavery Society.
In writing autobiography, however, Douglass was trying something new that could not be expressed by doctrine or slogan. While he
was not exactly inventing a new language, he was forging a new mission for his words, the mission of employing the written word in order to present himself (as Waldo Martin observes) as both a self-­made
man and a self-­conscious hero.6 To be self-­made is to claim American
citizenship, no matter what the laws of the land designate a fugitive
slave to be; to be self-­conscious is to present unabashedly one’s intelligence and humanity, which is the intelligence and humanity a whole
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xi
maligned race will cultivate once the beatings end and the chains are
broken.
Insofar as Douglass represents his race in the Narrative, he par­tic­i­
pates in yet another American narrative tradition, the narrative of
representativeness or of the representative man. Douglass’s own pursuit of this narrative is arresting because he portrays himself as a
­fig­ure of the race’s degradation (“You have seen how a man was
made a slave . . .”) as well as a fig­ure of the race’s strength and character (“. . . you shall see how a slave was made a man”) (NFD 72). But his
representativeness is accompanied by his exceptionalism. Indeed,
Douglass’s experience is exceptional in that from boyhood to manhood he lives within a rather benign form of slavery that offers, early
on, few chores, access to a grandmother’s affections, and, later, the
relative “freedoms” of being a city slave in Baltimore, including just
enough freedom to become literate and to earn money for an escape
north.
Douglass’s literacy be­comes his most sought-­after, prized, and exceptional possession. In the Narrative, his language virtually cavorts
as he describes exactly what he learns when Mr. Hugh Auld forbids
his wife, Sophia Auld, to instruct young Frederick in “the A, B, C”:
Whilst I was saddened by the thought of losing the aid of my kind
mistress, I was gladdened by the invaluable instruction which, by
the merest accident, I had gained from my master. Though conscious of the dif­fi­culty of learning without a teacher, I set out with
high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn
how to read. The very decided manner in which he spoke, and
strove to impress his wife with the evil consequences of giving me
instruction, served to convince me that he was deeply sensible of
the truths he was uttering. It gave me the best assurance that I
might rely with the utmost con­fi­dence on the results which, he
said, would flow from teaching me to read. What he most dreaded,
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that I most desired. What he most loved, that I most hated. That
which to him was a great evil, to be carefully shunned, was to me a
great good, to be diligently sought. (NFD 45)
Each sentence of this lengthy quote presents a reversal, a kind of
­chiasmus, and the rhythmic repetition of these reversals or oppositions is the drumbeat of Douglass’s march to literacy and freedom.
Robert O’Meally takes this point further: “this fig­ure of speech, this
verbal reversal, is important to the structure and meaning of Douglass’s whole book . . . For Douglass’s mission was not merely to write a
nicely balanced set of sentences but to undermine and reverse a system of power relations.”7
It may also be said that Douglass seeks to undermine a system of
power when he pursues one of the primary objectives of the 1845 Narrative, naming the places and personages of his enslavement. This he
pursues throughout the book. There is power in naming, especially
when a name appears in print to be forever associated with some
atrocity. Thus we know by the end of Chapter 4 that Captain Anthony
relished whipping slaves, notably the comely Aunt Hester, and that
overseer Mr. Gore shot and killed a slave. Then there was Mr. Thomas
Lanman, who killed two slaves, one with a hatchet. And oh yes, Mr.
Giles Hick’s wife, who beat to death with a stick a teenage slave girl (a
cousin of Douglass’s wife, Anna Murray Douglass), and Mr. Beal
Bondly (ac­tually, according to David Blight, his name was John Beal
Bordley, Jr.), who shot an old slave man who drifted onto Bondly’s
property while fishing. We sense that Douglass could have gone on in
this vein were there not other lists he wanted to compose, for example, his list of slaveholders who were not only purportedly religious
men but also men of the cloth. Such a list appears in Chapter 10.
There we encounter the Rev. Daniel Weeden and the Rev. Rigby
­Hopkins, the latter known in the neighborhood for priding himself
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xiii
on slave management, a “feature of his government” being that he
whipped slaves “in advance of deserving it” (NFD 82). In this vein,
Douglass also makes it known that Wright Fairbanks and Garrison
[Garretson] West, both class leaders at their church, were the white
men who violently broke up the Sabbath School that Douglass had
or­ga­nized among the slaves and free black people.
While there is power in naming the names and writing them down,
there is possibly a greater power in being able to comment on and
otherwise play with the names of men whom Douglass could not
have accosted verbally as a slave. Two examples readily come to mind:
Douglass’s remarks early in the Narrative about Mr. Severe, and his
“play” with Mr. Freeland’s name in Chapter 10. Records show that
Douglass’s Mr. Severe spelled his name “Sevier.” While we must consider that Douglass did not know the exact spelling of “Sevier,” it is
also quite tempting to think that he did know the spelling but chose
“Severe” to vivify his portrait of slavery’s atrocities and to be true to
his memory of the man. Douglass’s point is summed up in one sentence: “Mr. Severe was rightly named: he was a cruel man” (NFD 23).
Mr. Freeland, in some mea­sure, was the opposite of Mr. Severe; Douglass describes him as “the best master I ever had, till I became my own
master” (NFD 86). Living with Mr. Freeland kindles the desire to be
truly free, as Douglass indicates in this play on Freeland’s name: “At
the close of the year 1834, Mr. Freeland again hired me of my master,
for the Year 1835. But, by this time, I began to want to live upon free
land as well as with Freeland; and I was no ­longer content, therefore,
to live with him or any other slaveholder” (NFD 86). At the very least,
we see in these passages Douglass remembering places and names
and, in some fundamental way, wresting control of those memories
by handling, and in that sense owning, the names of the people who
once, in effect, owned him.
While naming names or not—Douglass is careful to withhold the
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INTRODUCTION
names of fig­ures white and black who variously assisted him—is a
way for Douglass to control the past, naming also plays a role in his
forging of the future. It is noteworthy that with virtually each mea­
sure of freedom achieved, Douglass contemplates his own name and
renames himself. Here is an account of such renaming from the Narrative’s Chapter 11:
On the morning after our arrival at New Bedford, while at the
breakfast table, the question arose as to what name I should be
called by. The name given me by my mother was, “Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey.” I, however, had dispensed with the two
middle names before I left Maryland so that I was generally known
by the name of “Frederick Bailey.” I started from Baltimore bearing
the name of “Stanley.” When I got to New York, I again changed my
name to “Frederick Johnson,” and thought that would be the last
change. But when I got to New Bedford, I found it necessary again
to change my name . . . there were so many Johnsons in New Bedford, it was already quite dif­fi­cult to distinguish between them. I
gave Mr. Johnson [an African American abolitionist benefactor]
the privilege of choosing me a name, but told him he must not take
from me the name of “Frederick.” I must hold on to that, to preserve a sense of my identity. Mr. Johnson had just been reading the
“Lady of the Lake,” and at once suggested that my name be “Douglass.” From that time until now I have been called “Frederick Douglass.” (NFD 110)
Much is suggested here. Shedding his two middle names, probably
in Baltimore while he was preparing for his escape, may be likened to
an earlier moment when Douglass scrubbed off the “dead skin” and
“mange” of slavery in preparation for his first trip to Baltimore: each
action is a ritual cleansing. “Augustus” and “Washington,” not unlike
“Pompey,” “Caesar,” and “Zeus,” and so on, are ultimately pompous,
mocking given names in the context of slavery, no matter who be-
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xv
stows the names on a slave child. In planning his escape north, Douglass intended, in multiple senses of the term, to “travel light”; he did
not need the “baggage” of “Augustus” and “Washington,” and so, with
his new attentiveness to language, he edited his name accordingly.
Douglass’s negotiation within and beyond the name of “Johnson”
is equally fascinating. He eventually complains that he was a “Johnson” in a horde of “Johnsons,” but ­wasn’t that at first desirable?
­Wouldn’t an escaping fugitive slave want in some mea­sure to blend
into the Northern black masses so as to be invisible and protected?
It may well be that Douglass successfully makes his way from New
York to New Bedford in part because he is at the time another Negro
named Johnson. In New Bedford, however, apparently by the time of
his first breakfast there, Douglass is already thinking that he is one of
too many (African American) Johnsons in the neighborhood. In
short, what he so poignantly realizes is that he no ­longer needs to be a
Johnson in order to be free; he can choose his own, distinctive name.
Of course, Douglass ­didn’t need to worry: he would have distinguished himself whatever his surname. But it is striking that he
wanted a new name, and that he asked a literate New Bedford (free)
African American also named Johnson to direct him to his new name.
That Mr. Johnson, who had been reading Sir Walter Scott’s “Lady of
the Lake” (one wonders what Samuel Clemens may have later remarked about this), suggested “Douglas” would seem faintly ridiculous if it ­weren’t for the fact that Douglas was a Scottish king and a
“hero in search of lost patrimony,” like our Douglass, whose life’s
journey was in part a search for a father and a fatherland.
In his essay on the 1845 Narrative, “A Psalm of Freedom,” David Blight
reminds us that our readings of the Narrative are affected by the times
we live in and by the issues at hand.8 Here I would like to comment on
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how three books of the last de­cade have led me to new assessments of
the Narrative.
In 1997, Saidiya Hartman published her groundbreaking study
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America. Early on in her discussion, she makes it clear that
she will not focus on the “terrible spectacles” in the literature of slavery, such as the murder of Uncle Tom in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the beating of Aunt Hester in Chapter 1 of Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, in great part because she worries about “the ease
with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the casualness with
which they are circulated, and consequences of this routine display
of the slave’s ravaged black body.”9 Hartman instead sets her task as
follows:
Rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its
aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I
have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which
terror can hardly be discerned—slaves dancing in the quarters, the
outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the constitution of
humanity in slave law, and the fashioning of the self-­possessed individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the
terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle.10
For Douglass’s Narrative, she homes in on those moments when
Douglass describes slaves reveling during the Christmas holidays or
singing on their way to collect provisions at Great House Farm—moments that some readers might interpret as evidence of slave contentment, but that she reads as indications of the terrors and corrosions
of slave life.
Hartman’s discussion is especially striking when she explores what
she calls the “opacity of black song.” Black song has been “opaque” at
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xvii
times for listeners and performers alike. For example, it can be extremely dif­fi­cult to clarify, “with any degree of certainty or assuredness, the politics of slave song and performance when dissolution and
redress collude with one another and terror is yoked to enjoyment.”11
The opacity of black song is suggested in Douglass’s account (in
Chapter 2) of the slaves singing on their way to Great House Farm:
While on their way, they would make the dense old woods, for
miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once
the highest joy and the deepest sadness. . . . I did not, when a slave,
understand the deep meaning of those rude and apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle; so that I neither saw
nor heard as those without might see or hear. They told a tale of
woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension;
they were tones long, loud, and deep; they breathed the prayer
and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish.
(NFD 25)
In this passage Douglass is clear about how “opaque” the songs were
to him when he was a slave and “within the circle,” part of his point
seeming to be that now that he is free and literate he comprehends
and understands what was coherent in the songs: “testimony against
slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.” It is not
at all clear that ev­ery­one “without” the circle might “see or hear” as
Douglass came to see and hear, but that, too, is one of his developing
themes and exhortations: Become a good listener! Listen well! Enlist
in the cause! Indeed, Douglass tells his reader, if you wish to be impressed with the “soul-­killing effects of slavery,” place yourself in the
deep pine woods near the Lloyd plantation on allowance-­day, and, “in
silence, analyze the sounds that shall pass through the chambers of
[your] soul” (NFD 26).
Yet Douglass’s Narrative begins with both the beating of Aunt
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Hester and the “wild notes” of slave songs, not one or the other event.
Douglass was no doubt well aware of the provocative and distracting
elements in his description of the beautiful Hester being stripped to
the waist and beaten by a crazed, jealous white man, but he told the
story anyway, not just because it was “the blood-­stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which [he] was about to pass”
(NFD 19), but because this was his aunt who was beaten! We are told
of her plight in the context of Douglass’s telling, and showing, what
pitiful semblance of a family slavery provided him. One could suppose that the family Douglass came to have in those early years was
the “circle” of slaves who sing their laments in the woods. But that
circle is described in ev­ery way except in familial terms; the loudness
and incoherence of the circle is for Douglass more frightening than
familial. His tears in the present-­day of his Narrative are occasioned
by recalling the songs, and if the songs cause him to recall people, too,
those people sadly enough are not iden­ti­fied as family. They are nondescript Negroes trapped in the claws of bondage.
The fact that Douglass wants us to hear right at the start Aunt
Hester’s shrieks and the songs of slaves trudging through the woods
leads me to a second book: The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering African
American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (2005), written
by the Australian historians Shane White and Graham White (no relation to each other). In this study, a finalist for the 2005 Frederick
Douglass Book Prize, White and White concentrate on the sounds the
slaves made, in particular the field calls, songs, prayers, sermons, and
the like, which were “the invigorating sounds of the reclamation of
their humanity.”12 Not surprisingly, when they turn to Douglass’s 1845
Narrative, they are drawn to the passage under discussion in which
slaves sing long and loud while en route to Great House Farm. Their
attention to the sounds of the slaves heightens our awareness of
Douglass’s commitment to a profoundly different proj­ect: he wants
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xix
us to hear the sounds the slaveholders made; he indicts slavery by
forcing us to listen to the cacophony that accompanies race oppression.
Consider, for example, the sounds of slavery emanating from
Chapter 2 of the Narrative. There, Douglass describes how the slave’s
work day begins with the blare of the slave driver’s horn: “At the
sound of this, all must rise, and be off to the field . . . and woe betides
them who hear not this morning summons” (NFD 23). Those who
hear not the horn are whipped, and so another sound that fills the air
is the whistling of the whip interlarded with the cries of the beaten.
The paragraph in which we learn this is also the one in which the
overseer, Mr. Severe, is introduced, the sound of his name being unto
itself a sound of bondage. Mr. Severe, we are told, is prodigiously profane as well as cruel, which introduces one of Douglass’s key themes:
whatever the venue, the country or the city, the profanity of the slaveholders is a sound of slavery.
When Mr. Severe dies, he is replaced by a Mr. Hopkins, who ­doesn’t
last long as the overseer. Douglass suggests that Mr. Hopkins was
deemed inadequate precisely because he was not only less cruel than
Mr. Severe but also less profane. After Hopkins ­comes Mr. Gore, another of Douglass’s aptly named overseers. In portraying Gore, Douglass dwells on his “sharp, shrill voice,” the sound of which produces
“horror and trembling” among the slaves. The portrait continues:
“Mr. Gore was a grave man, he indulged in no jokes, said no funny
words, seldom smiled. His words were in perfect keeping with his
looks, and his looks were in perfect keeping with his words. Overseers
will sometimes indulge in a witty word, even with the slaves; not so
with Mr. Gore. He spoke but to command, and commanded but to be
obeyed; he dealt sparingly with his words, and bountifully with his
whip” (NFD 34).
Mr. Gore, in short, sounds like someone who could kill somebody,
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and indeed, what ­comes next is Douglass’s account of Mr. Gore’s
shooting and killing a slave named Demby. Demby’s offense was that
he did not obey the command—the sound—of his “master’s voice”
(the “master” in this instance being Gore).
The account of the event could have ended there, but Douglass,
as shrewd a commentator as one might find, adds to his story another sound of slavery: that of Gore’s words of jus­tifi­ca­tion for killing
Demby. Douglass writes, “His [Gore’s] reply [to Colonel Lloyd] was,
(as well as I can remember,) that Demby had become unmanageable”
(NFD 35). Note Douglass’s inserted phrase “(as well as I can remember,).” This is a personal moment, an autobiographical moment, for
Douglass: as a slave, he personally has heard the noisome noise of
slavery and of a slave’s murder verbally exonerated. It is another moment, like that in which he overhears Mr. Auld forbidding his ABC
lessons, when Douglass earns a deeper knowledge of slavery by eavesdropping on men of power trying to explain themselves.
In one of the most polemical passages at the end of the Narrative,
Douglass writes about how quiet he found the North to be after enduring slavery in the South. Here, for example, is how he describes
the wharves of New Bedford:
Lying at the wharves, and riding in the stream, I saw many ships of
the finest model, in the best order, and of the largest size. Upon the
right and left, I was walled in by granite warehouses of the widest
dimensions, stowed to their utmost capacity with the necessaries
and comforts of life. Added to this, almost ev­ery­body seemed to
be at work, but noiselessly so, compared to what I had been accustomed to in Baltimore. There were no loud songs heard from those
engaged in loading and unloading ships. I heard no deep oaths or
horrid curses on the laborer. I saw no whipping of men [Douglass could have added that he heard no whipping of men]; but all
seemed to go smoothly on. Every man appeared to understand his
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work, and went at it with a sober, yet cheerful earnestness . . . To me
this looked exceedingly strange. (NFD 111)
Douglass is no doubt exaggerating the quietude (and model ef­fi­
ciency) of the scene, but it is an understandable exaggeration, given
his zeal for abolition and his personal gratitude for being in a new
locale, a new life.
If Douglass marvels at the scene in New Bedford, it is because his
own nightmarish memories of working in the shipyards of Baltimore
are so vivid. At one point, he tells of being hired to a Mr. William
Gardner, ship builder. His orders from Mr. Gardner were “to do whatever the carpenters commanded [him] to do.” That meant that Douglass was at “the beck and call of about seventy-­five men” and that he
was to regard them all as masters. Douglass recalls being “called a
dozen ways in the space of a single minute. Three or four voices would
strike my ear at the same moment.” It would sound like this: “Fred.,
come help me to cant this timber here.”—“Fred., come carry this timber yonder.”—“Fred., bring that roller here.”—“Fred., go get a fresh
can of water.”—“Fred., come help saw off the end of this timber.”
—“Fred., go quick, and get the crowbar.” As the passage continues,
Douglass makes certain to let us know that he ­wasn’t always called
“Fred,” to wit: “Halloo, nigger! come, turn this grindstone.” . . . I say,
darky, blast your eyes, why ­don’t you heat up some pitch?” . . . “Hold
on where you are! Damn you, if you move, I’ll knock your brains
out!” (NFD 95). This went on for some eight months.
Douglass’s recollections of his work at Gardner’s Shipyard con­firm
that a slave’s work in the city could be as demeaning, brutalizing, and
noisy as a slave’s work in the fields. They also help us understand why
Douglass would declare that, compared with what he experienced in
Baltimore, the wharves at New Bedford were “noiseless.” The wharves
of both cities emitted the din of work, but it was Douglass’s Baltimore
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that was markedly louder, for it was there that he was assaulted by the
sounds of slavery.
The fact that Douglass, in writing the Narrative, has achieved the
day when he can ac­tually compare the conditions of Northern and
Southern cities reminds us that his story is one of expanding geog­
raphies, of bursting beyond the narrow con­fines, geographical and
mental, imposed by slavery to keep a slave “world-­stupid.” It is Douglass’s great good fortune that he sees and experiences Baltimore at a
young age; he knows from then on that there are, even in slavery,
other places to live and other ways to live. Traveling to and from Baltimore is arguably even more important to Douglass than residing
there. Once aboard a Chesapeake sloop, young Douglass experiences
firsthand the near-­spiritual lift of wind and wave as well as the practical knowledge of seeing and mentally recording which way the steamboats turn when they sail north. Douglass’s expanding knowledge of
an American ge­og­ra­phy can be no more curtailed than his expanding
ability to read and write: in the words of a famous Robert Hayden
poem, he “Mean mean mean to be free.”13
The phrase “world-­stupid” ­comes from the pages of Edward P.
Jones’s novel The Known World, which won the National Book Award
in 2003. This is an important book, more important than its prizes.
It presents, among other main characters, Moses, a black slave who
be­comes the overseer on the plantation owned by Henry Town­send, a
black slaveholder in Virginia. Moses is, as a fellow slave named Elias,
who hates him, says, “world-­stupid,” so neither the roads nor the
heavens mean anything to him. Eventually, the slaves he oversees
mock him, saying things like, “Come on outa there, Mr. Moses man / Come on out and lead us to the Promise Land”; and as Jones’s narrator
notes, “People laughed, even the children.”14 In contrast, Douglass in
his Narrative is, as I have been suggesting, profoundly “world-­smart”
INTRODUCTION
xxiii
or in the pro­cess of becoming so. An early moment in that pro­cess—
a blues moment—is unforgettably described by Douglass as a time
when he did not know the days of the month or the months of the
year, but did know that he had to look for home elsewhere (NFD 41).
This is the rationale he gives for spending a day in the bow of a sloop,
looking ahead, when he was first shipped to Baltimore.
In Chapter 8 of the Narrative, Douglass is unexpectedly returned
to the Anthonys and to Colonel Lloyd’s plantation. Captain Anthony
has died and the entire property, including young Frederick (now
about eleven years old), must be “valuated.” This event nakedly reminds Frederick that he is property and that he might find himself
permanently returned to plantation life and to the cruelties of that
condition. He observes that the other slaves are not as agitated as he is
and offers this explanation: “I had known what it was to be kindly
treated; they had known nothing of the kind. They had seen little or
nothing of the world. They were in very deed men and ­women of sorrow, and acquainted with grief ” (NFD 55–56). Striking in that remark
is the suggestion that the other slaves were “world-­stupid,” something
that Douglass, even at age eleven, is determined not to be. His good
fortune is that when the valuation is completed and the property
newly divided, he is sent back to Baltimore. Two years later, however,
family quarrels among Douglass’s masters and mistresses lead to his
removal from the Auld household in Baltimore and return to the
plantations of St. Michael’s. It is during that voyage on the Chesapeake that Douglass makes careful note of “the direction which the
steamboats took to go to Philadelphia.” He adds, “I deemed this
knowledge of the utmost importance. My determination to run away
was again revived” (NFD 59).
Douglass’s dream of freedom, and of freedom being found and
­facilitated by wind and wave, is what sustains him in the nadir of
xxiv
INTRODUCTION
his enslavement, his year with the “slave-­breaker,” Mr. Covey. Covey’s
plantation was hell itself, but a hell near the water. And so Douglass
writes:
Our house stood within a few rods of the Chesapeake Bay, whose
broad bosom was ever white with sails from ev­ery quarter of the
habitable globe . . . I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s
Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and
traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number
of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always
affected me powerfully. My thoughts would compel utterance; and
there, with no audience but the Almighty, I would pour out my
soul’s complaint, in my rude way, with an apostrophe to the moving multitude of ships. (NFD 71)
With these words Douglass introduces the apostrophe that William
Lloyd Garrison appraised in 1845 as the most thrilling of the Narrative’s “many passages of eloquence and power” (NFD 7). Many other
readers over more than 150 years have offered similar praise. Rather
than present a sizeable portion of that impassioned speech, I direct
you to these three short sentences from the middle of the address: “It
cannot be that I will live and die a slave. I will take to the water. This
very bay shall yet bear me into freedom” (NFD 72). Little wonder,
then, that the plan for the (thwarted) 1835 escape attempt involved
first going up the bay by canoe.
One would think that in this ge­og­ra­phy of slavery the worst site of
terror (and hence the space most distinct from the Chesapeake shore)
would be Covey’s plantation. But the plantation, perhaps because it is
a work place, is presented as something of a liminal space, a space
where a man can be worked as a slave but also where a slave can work
to become a man. Indeed, it is in Covey’s stable in the heart of the
plantation that Douglass quickens into manhood and strikes back at
INTRODUCTION
xxv
Covey, bloodying him in their epic two-­hour battle. For Douglass, the
site of unabated terror is the “thick wood,” which he immediately
iden­ti­fies as “a place new to me.” What is certainly new to him is to
be taken into the wood by Covey for merciless beatings. The beatings
begin right after Douglass arrives at Covey’s plantation and continue
right up through the thrashing that occasions Douglass’s pitiful attempt to secure the protection of his master (Thomas Auld), who had
hired him out to Covey. There are stories of slaves find­ing a respite
from slavery in the deep woods and similar places. Douglass gestures
toward those stories in relating that a slave named Sandy took him to
“another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if I
would take some of it with me, carrying it always on my right side, it
would render it impossible for Mr. Covey, or any other white man, to
whip me” (NFD 76). He even goes so far as to declare that on the day
of his marathon battle with Covey “the virtue of the root was fully
tested” (NFD 76). But that is as far as Douglass goes in rendering this
portion of his Narrative a “conjure story.” His struggle with Covey is
to be a story of manhood, not of magic.15
Obviously, Douglass, as a slave, does not know as much about the
world as he will come to know once he flees from bondage, but what
does he know when he is sixteen or seventeen years of age and beginning in earnest to plot his escape? How world-­smart is he while living
in circumstances determined to keep him “world-­stupid”? Douglass
is quite explicit about what he and the brave souls planning to escape
with him knew in 1835:
We could see no spot this side of the ocean, where we could be free.
We knew nothing about Canada. Our knowledge of the north did
not extend farther than New York; and to go there, and be forever
harassed with the frightful liability of being returned to slavery—
with the certainty of being treated tenfold worse than before—
xxvi
INTRODUCTION
the thought was truly a horrible one, and one which it was not
easy to overcome. The case sometimes stood thus: At ev­ery gate
through which we were to pass, we saw a watchman—at ev­ery ferry
a guard—on ev­ery bridge a sentinel—and in ev­ery wood a patrol.
We were hemmed in on ev­ery side. (NFD 87)
With these words, Douglass maps geographies and anxieties, the one
being impossible to describe without the other. In passages such as
this one, he tells a special truth about the ordeal of slavery, a truth
about the mental travail of bondage.
Douglass’s audiences of the 1840s wanted him fi­nally to divulge the
“facts” of his servitude—the names, the places, the dates. In writing
the Narrative, Douglass supplied those facts, but he also challenged
the conventional expectations of what exactly a fact of slavery might
be. This occurred because he was writing a narrative that was to be as
personal as it was historical. Douglass’s 1845 Narrative is a great American book because it is a great American autobiography. Like so many
fine autobiographers who followed him, Douglass knew that both his
“objective” facts and his “subjective” facts were true, and that offering
both was a key to telling his story well. Telling his story was part of
daring to be free. Writing his story was a next step in inventing himself, a step con­firming his hard-­won literacy and his intention to take
his place in the world.
Notes
1.Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855, reprint, New
York: Dover, 1969), p. 362. All future page references are to this edition and
are accompanied by the letters “MB.”
2.Frederick Douglass, “My Slave Experience in Maryland: An Address
Delivered in New York, New York, on 6 May 1845,” in John W. Blassingame,
ed., The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 27–34.
INTRODUCTION
xxvii
3.Benjamin Quarles, “Introduction,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative
of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845,
reprint, Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960),
p. xix. All future page references are to the present edition and are accompanied by the letters “NFD.”
4.Robert O’Meally, “Frederick Douglass’ 1845 Narrative: The Text Was
Meant to Be Preached,” in Dexter Fisher and Robert B. Stepto, eds., AfroAmerican Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (New York: Modern
Language Association, 1978), pp. 192–211; Quarles, “Introduction,” p. xix;
David Blight, “Introduction: A Psalm of Freedom,” in Frederick Douglass,
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by
Himself (1845, reprint, New York: Bedford Books, 1993), pp. 1–23.
5.Blight, “Introduction,” p. 8.
6.Waldo Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), pp. 253–278.
7.Robert O’Meally, “Introduction: Crossing Over: Frederick Douglass’s
Run for Freedom,” in Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845, reprint, New York:
Barnes and Noble, 2003), p. xxvi.
8.Blight, “Introduction,” pp. 18–19.
9.Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and SelfMaking in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), p. 3.
10.Ibid., p. 4.
11.Ibid., p. 35.
12.Shane White and Graham White, The Sounds of Slavery: Discovering
African American History through Songs, Sermons, and Speech (Boston:
Beacon, 2005), p. ix.
13.Robert Hayden, “Runagate, Runagate,” in Frederick Glaysher, ed.,
Robert Hayden Collected Poems (New York: Liveright, 1985), p. 59.
14.Edward P. Jones, The Known World (New York: Amistad Harper
Collins, 2003), p. 332.
15.In 1888, forty-­three years after Douglass shared his story about a slave
named Sandy and the special root that could protect a slave from white
folks, Charles W. Chesnutt published “Po’ Sandy,” a conjure story in which
Sandy’s wife, a conjure woman named Tenie, turns him into a tree in the
hope of giving him some respite from the master. Unfortunately, Sandy is
milled into boards for a new kitchen. Their stories are different, but might it
xxviii
INTRODUCTION
be that Douglass’s story about a slave named Sandy occasioned Chesnutt’s
story? Chesnutt was well versed in Douglass’s writings and career. He
authored the biography of Douglass in the Beacon Biographies of Eminent
Americans series: Charles W. Chesnutt, Frederick Douglass (Boston: Small,
Maynard, 1899).
Letter From Wendell Phillips, Esq.
Boston, April 22, 1845.
My Dear Friend:
You remember the old fable of “The Man and the Lion,” where the lion
complained that he should not be so misrepresented “when the lions
wrote history.”
I am glad the time has come when the “lions write history.” We have
been left long enough to gather the character of slavery from the involuntary evidence of the masters. One might, indeed, rest suf­fic­ iently sat­is­
fied with what, it is evident, must be, in general, the results of such a relation, without seeking farther to find whether they have followed in ev­ery
instance. Indeed, those who stare at the half-peck of corn a week, and
love to count the lashes on the slave’s back, are seldom the “stuff ” out of
which reformers and abolitionists are to be made. I remember that, in
1838, many were waiting for the results of the West India experiment, be
11
12
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
fore they could come into our ranks. Those “results” have come long ago;
but, alas! few of that number have come with them, as converts. A man
must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it
has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips ­women,—before he is ready
to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.
I was glad to learn, in your story, how early the most neglected of
God’s children waken to a sense of their rights, and of the injustice done
them. Experience is a keen teacher; and long before you had mastered
your A B C, or knew where the “white sails” of the Chesapeake were
bound, you began, I see, to gauge the wretchedness of the slave, not by
his hunger and want, not by his lashes and toil, but by the cruel and
blighting death which gathers over his soul.
In connection with this, there is one circumstance which makes your
recollections peculiarly valuable, and renders your early insight the more
remarkable. You come from that part of the country where we are told
slavery appears with its fairest features. Let us hear, then, what it is at its
best estate—gaze on its bright side, if it has one; and then imagination
may task her powers to add dark lines to the picture, as she travels southward to that (for the colored man) Valley of the Shadow of Death, where
the Mississippi sweeps along.
Again, we have known you long, and can put the most entire con­fi­
dence in your truth, candor, and sincerity. Every one who has heard you
speak has felt, and, I am con­fi­dent, ev­ery one who reads your book will
feel, persuaded that you give them a fair specimen of the whole truth. No
one-sided portrait,—no wholesale complaints,—but strict justice done,
whenever individual kindliness has neutralized, for a moment the deadly
system with which it was strangely allied. You have been with us, too,
some years, and can fairly compare the twilight of rights, which your race
enjoy at the North, with that “noon of night” under which they labor
south of Mason and Dixon’s line. Tell us whether, after all, the half-free
LETTER FROM WENDELL PHILLIPS, ESQ.
13
colored man of Massachusetts is worse off than the pampered slave of
the rice swamps!
In reading your life, no one can say that we have unfairly picked out
some rare specimens of cruelty. We know that the bitter drops, which
even you have drained from the cup, are no incidental aggravations, no
individual ills, but such as must mingle always and necessarily in the lot
of ev­ery slave. They are the essential ingredients, not the occasional results, of the system.
After all, I shall read your book with trembling for you. Some years
ago, when you were beginning to tell me your real name and birthplace,
you may remember I stopped you, and preferred to remain ignorant of
all. With the exception of a vague description, so I continued, till the
other day, when you read me your memoirs. I hardly knew, at the time,
whether to thank you or not for the sight of them, when I re­flected that it
was still dangerous, in Massachusetts, for honest men to tell their names!
They say the fathers, in 1776, signed the Declaration of Inde­pen­dence
with the halter about their necks. You, too, publish your declaration of
freedom with danger compassing you around. In all the broad lands
which the Constitution of the United States overshadows, there is no
single spot,—however narrow or desolate,—where a fugitive slave can
plant himself and say, “I am safe.” The whole armory of Northern Law
has no shield for you. I am free to say that, in your place, I should throw
the MS. into the fire.
You, perhaps, may tell your story in safety, endeared as you are to so
many warm hearts by rare gifts, and a still rarer devotion of them to the
ser­vice of others. But it will be owing only to your labors, and the fearless
efforts of those who, trampling the laws and Constitution of the country
under their feet, are determined that they will “hide the outcast,” and that
their hearths shall be, spite of the law, an asylum for the oppressed, if,
some time or other, the humblest may stand in our streets, and bear witness in safety against the cruelties of which he has been the victim.
14
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Yet it is sad to think, that these very throbbing hearts which welcome
your story, and form your best safeguard in telling it, are all beating contrary to the “statute in such case made and provided.” Go on, my dear
friend, till you, and those who, like you, have been saved, so as by fire,
from the dark prison-house, shall stereotype these free, illegal pulses into
statutes; and New En­gland, cutting loose from a blood-stained ­Union,
shall glory in being the house of refuge for the oppressed;—till we no
­longer merely “hide the outcast,” or make a merit of standing idly by
while he is hunted in our midst; but, consecrating anew the soil of the
Pilgrims as an asylum for the oppressed, proclaim our welcome to the
slave so loudly, that the tones shall reach ev­ery hut in the Carolinas, and
make the broken-hearted bondman leap up at the thought of old Massachusetts.
God speed the day!
Till then, and ever,
Yours truly,
Wendell Phillips.
Frederick Douglass.
CHAPTER
1
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
I
w a s b or n i n Tuckahoe, near Hillsborough, and about twelve
miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have no accurate
knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it. By far the larger part of the slaves know as little of their age
as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most masters within
my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant. I do not remember to have ever met a slave who could tell of his birthday. They seldom come nearer to it than planting-­time, harvest-­time, cherry-­time,
spring-­time, or fall-­time. A want of information concerning my own
was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood. The white
children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived of the same privilege. I was not allowed to make any in­quir­ies
of my master concerning it. He deemed all such in­quir­ies on the part
of a slave improper and impertinent, and evidence of a restless spirit.
The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-­seven
15
16
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
and twenty-­eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master
say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.
My mother was named Harriet Bailey. She was the daughter of
Isaac and Betsey Bailey, both colored, and quite dark. My mother was
of a darker complexion than either my grandmother or grandfather.
My father was a white man. He was admitted to be such by all I
ever heard speak of my parentage. The opinion was also whispered
that my master was my father; but of the correctness of this opinion,
I know nothing; the means of knowing was withheld from me. My
mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew
her as my mother. It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland
from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very
early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month,
its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a consid­
erable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old
woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do
not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection
of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.
I never saw my mother, to know her as such, more than four or five
times in my life; and each of these times was very short in duration,
and at night. She was hired by a Mr. Stewart, who lived about twelve
miles from my home. She made her journeys to see me in the night,
travelling the whole distance on foot, after the performance of her
day’s work. She was a field hand, and a whipping is the penalty of not
being in the field at sunrise, unless a slave has special permission from
his or her master to the contrary—a permission which they seldom
get, and one that gives to him that gives it the proud name of being a
kind master. I do not recollect of ever seeing my mother by the light
of day. She was with me in the night. She would lie down with me,
and get me to sleep, but long before I waked she was gone. Very little
CHAPTER 1
17
communication ever took place between us. Death soon ended what
little we could have while she lived, and with it her hardships and suffering. She died when I was about seven years old, on one of my master’s farms, near Lee’s Mill. I was not allowed to be present during her
illness, at her death, or burial. She was gone long before I knew any
thing about it. Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her
soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings
of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably
felt at the death of a stranger.
Called thus suddenly away, she left me without the slightest intimation of who my father was. The whisper that my master was my
father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose whilst the fact remains, in all its glaring odiousness, that slaveholders have ordained, and by law established, that
the children of slave ­women shall in all cases follow the condition of
their mothers; and this is done too obviously to administer to their
own lusts, and make a grati­fi­ca­tion of their wicked desires profit­
able as well as pleasurable; for by this cunning arrangement, the slaveholder, in cases not a few, sustains to his slaves the double relation of
master and father.
I know of such cases; and it is worthy of remark that such slaves
invariably suffer greater hardships, and have more to contend with,
than others. They are, in the first place, a constant offence to their
mistress. She is ever disposed to find fault with them; they can seldom
do any thing to please her; she is never better pleased than when she
sees them under the lash, especially when she suspects her husband of
showing to his mulatto children favors which he withholds from his
black slaves. The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of his
slaves, out of deference to the feelings of his white wife; and, cruel as
the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children
to human flesh-­mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him
18
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
to do so; for, unless he does this, he must not only whip them himself,
but must stand by and see one white son tie up his brother, of but few
shades darker complexion than himself, and ply the gory lash to his
naked back; and if he lisp one word of disapproval, it is set down to
his parental partiality, and only makes a bad matter worse, both for
himself and the slave whom he would protect and defend.
Every year brings with it multitudes of this class of slaves. It was
doubtless in consequence of a knowledge of this fact, that one great
statesman of the south predicted the downfall of slavery by the inevitable laws of population. Whether this prophecy is ever fulfilled or
not, it is nevertheless plain that a very different-­looking class of people are springing up at the south, and are now held in slavery, from
those originally brought to this country from Africa; and if their increase will do no other good, it will do away the force of the argument, that God cursed Ham, and therefore American slavery is right.
If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved,
it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural;
for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself,
owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently
their own masters.
I have had two masters. My first master’s name was Anthony. I
do not remember his first name. He was generally called Captain Anthony—a title which, I presume, he acquired by sailing a craft on the
Chesapeake Bay. He was not considered a rich slaveholder. He owned
two or three farms, and about thirty slaves. His farms and slaves were
under the care of an overseer. The overseer’s name was Plummer. Mr.
Plummer was a miserable drunkard, a profane swearer, and a savage
monster. He always went armed with a cowskin and a heavy cudgel. I
have known him to cut and slash the ­women’s heads so horribly, that
even master would be enraged at his cruelty, and would threaten to
CHAPTER 1
19
whip him if he did not mind himself. Master, however, was not a humane slaveholder. It required extraordinary barbarity on the part of
an overseer to affect him. He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life
of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great plea­sure in
whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by
the most heart-­rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he
used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was
literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his
gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the
blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to
make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-­clotted cowskin. I
remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I
was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I
remember any thing. It was the first of a long series of such outrages,
of which I was doomed to be a witness and a par­tic­i­pant. It struck me
with awful force. It was the blood-­stained gate, the entrance to the
hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I
beheld it.
This occurrence took place very soon after I went to live with my
old master, and under the following circumstances. Aunt Hester went
out one night,—where or for what I do not know,—and happened to
be absent when my master desired her presence. He had ordered her
not to go out evenings, and warned her that she must never let him
catch her in company with a young man, who was paying attention
to her belonging to Colonel Lloyd. The young man’s name was Ned
Roberts, generally called Lloyd’s Ned. Why master was so careful of
her, may be safely left to conjecture. She was a woman of noble form,
20
LIFE OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS
and of graceful proportions, having very few equals, and fewer sup­
eriors, in personal appearance, among the colored or white ­women of
our neighborhood.
Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but
had been found in company with Lloyd’s Ned; which circumstance, I
found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence.
Had he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been
thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those
who knew him will not suspect him of any such virtue. Before he
commenced whipping Aunt Hester, he took her into the kitchen, and
stripped her from neck to waist, leaving her neck, shoulders, and
back, entirely naked. He then told her to cross her hands, calling her
at the same time a d—d b—h. After crossing her hands, he tied them
with a strong rope, and led her to a stool under a large hook in the
joist, put in for the purpose. He made her get upon the stool, and tied
her hands to the hook. She now stood fair for his infernal purpose.
Her arms were stretched up at their full length, so that she stood upon
the ends of her toes. He then said to her, “Now, you d—d b—h, I’ll
learn you how to disobey my orders!” and after rolling up his sleeves,
he commenced to lay on the heavy cowskin, and soon the warm, red
blood (amid heart-­rending shrieks from her, and horrid oaths from
him) came dripping to the floor. I was so terrified and horror-­stricken
at the sight, that I hid myself in a closet, and dared not venture out till
long after the bloody transaction was over. I expected it would be my
turn next. It was all new to me. I had never seen any thing like it before. I had always lived with my grandmother on the outskirts of the
plantation, where she was put to raise the children of the youn­ger
­women. I had therefore been, until now, out of the way of the bloody
scenes that often occurred on the plantation.